The world is dull penumbra and disorder

in the foreground where man is found.

But now the stars, concealing landscapes,

reveal the perfect schema of their [orbits].

The current of time pools and gains order

in the numbered forms of century after century.

And conquered Death takes refuge trembling

in the tight circle of the present instant. (Lorca, Ode to Salvador Dali 45-52)

1a. Wittgenstein famously spoke of Lebensformen and Weltbilder as (quasi-transcendental) conditions of thought and practice. When he first introduces the term “world-picture”, his example is our certainty that the earth has existed prior to our own birth. The contrary idea need not be falsifiable but, rather, would require a radical conversion to another Weltbild (which may or may not have different truth conditions). Analogously to the way the arche-fossil sounds the empirical knell to transcendental philosophy, the critique of the (myth of the) given is simply the construction of a world at the chiastic intersection of the transcendental horizon of language and the material genesis of life.

1b. It is, actually, the second gesture of critique, qua genealogy, to ask what forces bind us to the given, presented as the objective against which the waves of desire and fantasy break. Against such historicism, the inauguration of critique is non-identity, which is mutually exclusive of the principle of sufficient reason (Schelling). A world is, therefore, not a gathering into an All but the totality of the invisible negation of the All, marked by the visible itself (as traces of the invisible), as that which is “behind” the visible in the structures of sense and sensibility.

“Becoming is always double, and it is this double becoming that constitutes the people to come and the new earth. The philosopher must become nonphilosopher so that nonphilosophy becomes the earth and people of philosophy” (Deleuze).

2. There must be only one ontological proposition: against the impossible (self-)coincidence of the One-All (or the identity of being and the good), we must affirm that being is not.* This proposition resides at the heart of the chiasm between ontology and logic, i.e., in language. Between Herder and Heidegger, we have in language not the form of reason but of being, precisely in the distance between the concept and the unity of sensation. Language is transformative not of experience (say, in poetry) but of the world itself through the name. “In the beginning was the Word.” A world in which a being can be named is made possible only in the nomination. “What’s in a name?” Perhaps, a world.

*Correlatively, a-theism must, against onto-theology, acknowledge the existence of gaps and gluts.

Therefore our valuation of a world ranges from empty to maximal because there are no facts (for the same reason that Schelling insisted that we cannot know, reflectively, the relation of thought to being). The sweetness is in the “rose”.

3. In some remote hypothetical catastrophe of natural history, the exuberance of life was suspended by the cacophony of thought. The most direct refutation of idealism, à la Moore, is the existence of a being through which being is (an)nihilated. The moment when humanity began to trample the earth was simultaneously creative and ruinous. The earth groans and rages beneath the weight of innovation and industry and takes its revenge in the anonymous death of thousands.

“A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot be concerned any more with art or philosophy. But books of philosophy and works of art also contain their sum of unimaginable sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people. They have resistance in common—their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the present.” (Deleuze)

In “the time that remains” there is only one commandment: to love the world as oneself, which demands nothing less than the suspension of the ethical demands of purity of the will in the name of justice. The only possible repentance for the devastation of the earth is the creation of a world worthy of love.

that cuts men down before their prime, I curse,

but the lovely girl who finds a mate’s embrace,

the deep joy of wedded life – O grant that gift, that prize,

you gods of wedlock, grant it, goddesses of Fate!

Sisters born of the Night our mother,

spirits steering law,

sharing at all our hearths,

at all times bearing down

to make our lives more just,

all realms exalt you highest of the gods (Aeschylus, Eum. 968-978)

The price for justice is the promise of happiness, wherein lies the tragedy that Aeschylus foresaw in the day that we must renounce the Eumendies’ blessing. We may make no claim to happiness and tranquility when justice has collapsed under the terrible weight of corpses that lie unattended in the street and the heavy gasps of lives extinguished by a blind terror and loathing of that which reminds us of our original guilt. Injustice is mute; no pronouncement of law returns what has been stolen. The law preserves only two things: itself and the fortunes of fate. But for those betrayed by the demands of justice (Abraham was spared from the sacrifice of his child but Agamemnon was not), their hearths cannot be rebuilt with the master’s tools (Lorde). The Erinyes demand sacrifice: not of life but in poverty, madness, and sickness. Such pure violence is the “boundless destruction of boundaries” (Benjamin) where divine fury razes what civilization has built to expose the barbarism buried at its foundation. And from these ruins we must begin again.